


The Sailor (Forty Years in the Desert)

by WhenasInSilks



Series: The Ruins of Babel [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Betrayal, Character Study, Other, POV Tony Stark, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Psychological Trauma, Tony Stark Has Trust Issues: A Brief History, gratuitous use of imagery, technically canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 03:25:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17890619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: In the desert, Tony learned what it was to drown.(aka, that pesky Tony character study i've been poking at for months. Part of a series, although can be read as a stand alone)





	The Sailor (Forty Years in the Desert)

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a character study piece for Tony, as a sort of companion to Lot’s Wife. It… didn’t turn out quite the way I’d intended, and I’m still a little unsure, but my lovely lovely betas (AbaddonsLittleWitch, spacejame, and neverthelessthesun, thanks to infinity, you guys) were very encouraging and it is, like, canon for this series and Tony’s portrayal in it, at least in my head, so here it is.

In the desert, Tony learned what it was to drown.

This was the first lesson:

White panic.

Scrabbling desperation, the frantic racing of his damaged heart, the world gone dark and cold and lethal. Water pushing at his lips, his nose, his ears, and no air—the one thing he’d always taken for granted—no air, no air, no air. He watched stars burst behind his eyes and wondered if each flaring light was a brain cell dying. Wondered how long it would take to damage him beyond repair.

This was the first lesson:

Hands on his head his back his neck hands pushing him down hands holding him beneath the surface hands hauling him up for one lung-searing gasp before they thrust him once more into down the deep. Hands that gaveth and hands that tooketh away and nothing Tony could do but clutch the car battery they gave him in place of a heart and pray to a god he didn’t believe in that the water wouldn’t short the system and kill him then and there.

For all the reckless shit he’d done over the years, all the ways he’d blithely courted his own destruction, all the death he’d enabled building weapons to sustain his father’s empire, he’d never really viewed his own life as something that could be taken from him. Something that could be lost, sure. Something that could be given up or thrown away, but not something that could be stolen—something that could be wrested from his grasping, terrified hands.

In a cave in Afghanistan—broken, alone, abandoned, betrayed—he learned.

Drowning is what happens when you drop your guard.

Even after he’d broken, promised to build his captors whatever they wanted, promised the sky itself, the moon the stars and the sun only let me breathe, only let me, only let— Even then, every so often they dragged him back to the trough, brought his face to the surface and shoved him under. A display of dominance, maybe. They wanted him to feel it, the helplessness that screamed down his spine and burst in his ears, the cold and the dark and the water always pushing always pushing, the horrible intimacy of it, the violation.

In the cave, Tony learned.

Drowning is what happens when you lose control.

Most people don’t understand. Most people are spoiled. They pass every minute of their lives in a world perfectly suited to their habitation, air and light and water and warmth and shelter. They can’t imagine, not really, what it’s like to have that world snatched away.

The drowned know, but few survive to tell the tale. Tony was determined to be one of them.

Another lesson: desperation breeds resolve.

He kind of thinks he could’ve figured that one out on his own.

First there was the cave, and the desert came after. In the cave, Tony learned, but in the desert, he understood.

There’s not much difference, when you come down to it, between the desert and the ocean. Not if you’re stranded there. No food. No sweet water. No protection from the elements, the glare of the sun or the bone-chilling cold of night. No chance of respite. You keep moving, or you die. You keep moving and you fight, every minute you fight for your survival and sometimes you die anyway but at least this way you have a chance.

The lesson of the desert is survival in a hostile world: you struggle and you fight and you never stop and you never give in and you never, not for one second, drop your guard.

The lesson of the ocean is this: you sink, or you swim.

Tony crashed to earth on wings of his own making, Icarus plunging into the sea. He pushed himself up, out of the wreckage, out of the sand and stared around the desert which was an ocean which was—though the true force of that lesson was yet to come—the world entire. And he fought. And he struggled. And he kept moving and he kept moving and he never dropped his guard.

And he  _ lived.  _

Except then there was Malibu. The world was a desert, was an ocean, was danger and treachery and death but Malibu? Malibu was  _ home.  _ That’s what he thought. He mistook his home for a haven and he let himself stop and he dropped his guard and Obadiah Stane plucked out his heart.

Lesson learned. 

He built the suit and he built more suits like a shipbuilder building rafts against the coming flood and he taught himself to fly and he forced the world to change and he never stopped and he never  _ stopped  _ and no one ever asked him why but he knew.

(And always, at the edge of his awareness, a waste of sands. Always the black water, waiting to swallow him whole).

Years later, when he stared into the tear in the sky above Manhattan and soared up to meet his death among unfamiliar stars, he thought of the desert. Staring out at the vastness of space as his systems failed around him, as the armor he’d built to sustain him became his tomb, he thought,  _ I remember this. _

_ I remember this— _ his last coherent thought as, alone, adrift, bereft, he ran out of breath and began to fall.

* * *

Sometimes even now Tony will think of Steve Rogers and picture an open port, the promise of ready berth and safe harbor. 

Oceans and deserts each weave their own illusions. The wanderer in the sands builds an oasis in his mind out of heat and light and the refractions of longing. The sun-stricken sailor on a ship becalmed sees green fields where once was sparkling blue, steps over the bow and sinks into salt.

Tony’s had more than his share of experience with mirages. And of course, because he’s always had to do things bigger than everyone else—louder, faster,  _ more _ —because he’d learned not to stop and no longer believed in  _ enough _ , the last time he let himself give in to an illusion he nearly killed himself and the rest of the planet right along with him. Say what you like about Tony Stark, but he’s always been a quick study. Ultron was lesson enough for a lifetime.

Except there was the team and for the first time he allowed himself to think, maybe. Allowed his guard to drop, just a little. Not all the way, not yet and maybe not ever, but for the first time since Malibu he let himself imagine it. Maybe refuge wasn’t a place at all. Maybe refuge could be people. Maybe it could be a person. Maybe… 

Yeah.

Not so much.

Follow that line of thinking far enough and it leads you right back to the wastes. Broken. Alone. Abandoned. Betrayed. The folly of Icarus in eternal recurrence. The only difference? This time, the desert was cold. 

Here’s the truth about Steve Rogers. 

Steve Rogers is the shoal on which the unwary sailor runs his ship aground. A lantern twinkling on a wrecking coast. A lie.

He thinks he must’ve known that from the start, known it from the very first time he laid eyes on the man, standing there like he’d stepped out of the pages of a comic book. Captain America, the hero of his childhood fantasies, shielding him from Nazis and schoolyard bullies and the withering weight of his father’s disapproval. What reality could possibly live up to a dream like that?

No. He knew it then, on the Helicarrier, even if later he allowed himself to forget. Captain America was never a promise that could be kept, and neither, in the end, was Steve Rogers.

After all, he learned a long time ago that there’s no salvation for him but what he makes for himself. In all this wide world, no salvation, and no such thing as safe harbor.

**Author's Note:**

> Probably not the series update you guys were hoping for, but the one I had on hand. Still working on Kingdom of Iron—a bit of plot’s crept in and made it troublesome, but I swear, I will get those two knocking boots if it kills me. 
> 
> If you enjoyed, please drop me a line! Your feedback is meat and drink to me. Well, actually, I don't eat meat. Quorn and drink? Find me these days mostly on dreamwidth or discord, or, very occasionally, on tumblr @whenas-in-silks.


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